Josiah on TV!

Well, it took a bit longer than we expected, but Josiah had his television debut today! We thought it would be Monday, turns out Monday was when we would find out the time of the Marimba band performance for the local news station. It was decided the performance would be Wednesday. He was featured on the local evening and morning news (ok, not just him, the entire band, but one can make it about out kid right?)

Josiah and Gorge (nephew of our host family) ready to go to concert

Watch the performance, I break away from the band for a moment to show the local news cameras

Other than Marimba band, the kids have also been doing zumba kids.  The kids even made it on their facebook page! You can see the video here: https://www.facebook.com/rayuelahonduras/videos/483906778708662/

We are almost done with our second week of classes, the time is going fast. Below is some more of the good food we have eaten:

Tostata - yum!  

This is a Honduran Taco. It is chicken rolled in a tortilla, deep fried, with vegetables on top.

Food, Ruins, and Butterflies - A fun weekend in Copan!

This weekend has been full of adventures! The first adventure was - no electricity! For over 24 hours there was no power. Which is not very fun when it is hot and humid and there is no power for the air conditioning or keeping the insulin cool. But we survived (and hopefully the insulin did too!).On a more exciting note, there was a request that I post some food so here are two pictures of some of the delicious food we are eating (not pictured is all the refried beans and tortillas we have been eating): 

Steak, Noodles, and Rice

Chicken, Vegetables, and Rice

As for our adventures this weekend, we visited some Mayan Ruins (the "Ruins" part of Copan Ruinas where we are living currently). This city was the capital city for the Mayan people around 400 AD to 600 AD. It was a dynasty of 16 kings before deforestation and a lack of food forced the people to abandon the site. The ruins are not completely excavated yet, so it was not as clean as Tikal, but still very impressive:

Josiah and Emma on the King's Bed (jumping on the bed!)

Nicole and Tyler being photo bombed by Emma

Nicole checking out some ruins

The family on one of the pyramids

Emma went exploring

Josiah also went exploring

These stairs have several statues of kings. Josiah is posing like a King

Emma also posed as a Queen

The ball field is in the background - winner gets sacrificed

Picture of the ball field

Our next adventure of the weekend was to visit the Butterfly Park. The place was full of beautiful butterflies all over the place. It was amazing and quite peaceful to just sit and watch them. I tried to take more pictures, but they were to small to get many good ones. Below are the most fun ones:

The family at the Butterfly Park

Emma had one land on her hand

Josiah had one land on his head!

We also visited a Mayan Architectural Museum and went shopping for Josiah (watch for our blog on Monday night or Tuesday for something fun!). But there were no fun pictures of those adventures. Our weekend is now coming to an end and we are getting ready for week 2 of 3 in Honduras before we leave for Nicaragua (via a weekend in El Salvador). 

Bird Park and End of First Week

Our first week in Honduras has come to an end. It feels like we just got here. Below are some fun pictures of the bird park we visited. Most of these birds live around the town we live in. This park is for helping these endangered birds. Several are born here and when they are ready, released into the wild. This park has helped several species avoid extension and move from the "endangered" list to the "threatened" list. Hopefully they won't be on any list soon! 

One landed right next to the kids

Emma was brave enough to get close

Tyler with the Birds

Nicole with the birds

Emma with the birds. I think the red one is the boss. 

Josiah with the birds

It seems next week Emma and Josiah's teachers will not be here, so they will each have new teachers next week. Nicole's current teacher will likely work with one of them, so Nicole will have a new teacher also. Tyler gets to keep his. So below are all our pictures with our great instructors!

Josiah with Skarlett

Emma with Maria

Nicole with Ana

Tyler with Kathy

Other adventures this week included a Zumba Kids class for both the kids, shopping downtown, a chocolate museum, and an amazing bakery that is run out of a  woman's living room. But we didn't get any pictures of that. 

This weekend should be full of fun tourist activities, so stay tuned for those. Also, it has been requested that I report more on food, so I'll try and get some pictures of some of the great stuff we have been eating! Thank you for following us! 

First days of classes!

We have started our classes and life in Honduras. Below are some pictures from our first two days of classes and adventures in Honduras.

First we needed money to buy stuff (front)

$1 USD = 23.9 Lempiras

We were very excited to start our summer classes, so clearly we needed a first day of school picture. We were all very excited!

First day of School!

We have to walk about 1 km (0.6 miles) to our school. Below is our starting point, our home from the outside. I posted pictures of the inside in my prior post.

Our host house

Our walk to school each day is very interesting. We have to go down the steepest hill I have every gone down (which means to go home we have to climb it - in the eat of the day, and there is no shade!). I'm am sure that parts of it are steeper than Lombard Street in San Francisco! We also found a very large bug on our first walk to school, so we had to capture it: 

Josiah checkout out our bug

Emma was not sure about the bug

Finally we arrived at our school after about a 10 minute walk. We learned most the town is closed in the morning, so there was not much to see or do on the way. Our school is called Ixbalanque Spanish School. Pictured below:

Us at our School

We each have our own private teacher. Tyler's teacher is Kathy, Nicole's teacher is Anna, Emma's teacher is Maria, and Josiah's teacher is Skarlett. They all seem very nice and ready to challenge us to learn more Spanish. We are the only family in the school currently. We were told about 10 years ago the school was full of students year round. But about 10 years ago, Honduras began to get bad publicity in the world news and fewer and fewer people have been traveling to the country. 

After classes was lunch and then the kids and I went into town for some adventures. Josiah decided to be brave and try a Marimba class. He learned a song that is the song of Copan Ruinas. It was very good. 

Josiah playing the Marimba Band

Emma and I went shopping and exploring during the time Josiah was making music. We checked out tourist shops, icecream shops, coffee shops, and central park. We got rained (poured) on at central park, but it was very fun either way.

Emma at Central Park

We are now wrapping up our second day, homework assignments need to be done, and other things need to be completed, so this blog entry is done for today! Thank you for reading and following us and our adventures! Tomorrow we are going to a Park of Birds, should be fun, can't wait to let you all know how it goes!

We are in Honduras!

Welcome back to our Blog (or welcome for first time readers!). We are excited to keep everyone posted on our adventures in Latin America. This trip will be studying Spanish three weeks in Honduras and Nicaragua and then playing for a week in Costa Rica. Classes start tomorrow, so for now, our adventures are just the trip down.

Nicole and the kids left for her mom's house on Thursday, I joined them Friday night after I submitted my grades at the college. Then we got up early - 2am - to head to the airport. This is us on the way out the door!

Family ready to go

Bags are packed!

The airport was uneventful. Our first flight out of Portland was at 5am. Because of Josiah's diabetes we got an escort to help us through security (front of the line!) and we got priority boarding so we would not have to check our carry on bags should the luggage space fill up. Below is the obligatory PDX picture:

PDX Carpet Photo

From there we flew to LAX where we had a 6 hours layover and had to go through security again (second time). It was not as smooth, but not bad either. We flew to El Salvador where we had a 30 minute layover... that was 30 minutes to get off the plane (we were in the 2nd to back row) and get to the OTHER SIDE of the airport. We were about 10 minutes late, but they radioed ahead and held the plane for us so we did not miss it. The unexpected surprise was we had to go through security again (3rd time). But we finally got out and arrived in San Pedro Sula, Honduras. After going through customs and security (4th time), we met our bus driver who took us to our hotel for the night.

Hotel For First Night

We had a good night sleep. There was a restaurant in the hotel where we had our first typical Honduran breakfast: eggs, toast, beans, plantains, and cheese. 

Typical Breakfast in Honduras

Afterwards we met our bus driver who would take us to our home in Copan Ruinas. But on the way we stopped for lunch. I forgot to take a picture of the food (sorry!), but we were distracted by this parrot that was hanging out.

Emma With the Parrot

Our Driver, Jose, showing Emma how to pet the Parrot

We finally arrived at our host family home at about 3pm, That was 37 hours after we left Portland and 46 hours I left Moses Lake. Our family is a couple whose kids recently moved out of the house (one is an architect in the capital, the other is going to school to be a special education teacher). Below are our bedrooms: 

Josiah and Emma's Room

Nicole and Tyler's Room

Classes will start tomorrow at 8am. Today will be spent resting and unpacking. Emma and Josiah are watching Ratatouille in Spanish to get a jump start on studying! Can't wait to keep you all posted on our future adventures here in Honduras!